Greg discussed the co-creation hypothesis at the Esotericon a couple of weeks ago. I honestly don't see how anyone doesn't understand what he's talking about - it's pretty straightforward. Anyway, you can
listen to his lecture here.
That was an excellent lecture – lots of valid points in there, and it was well-organized. And it helped me understand the problem with this whole debate.
The co-creation hypothesis is not an alternative hypothesis to the ETH at all. But people on The Paracast have routinely been talking about it as if it’s an alternative hypothesis to the ETH (perhaps because they both have the word “hypothesis” in their names). Instead, it’s primarily a look into perceptual psychology in general. Ultimately it may have little if anything to do with the ufo sighting experience, but rather all perceptual experiences in general, even the most mundane ones, such as the difference between the event of brushing your teeth this morning vs. your memory of the process.
So the co-creation hypothesis is more like a tool kit – it can and probably should be applied to any investigative and analytical effort involving the human perception of experiences – everything from witness testimony at criminal trials to sightings of meteors and anything else.
The ETH and the co-creation hypothesis are not competing concepts after all, it turns out. So people need to stop presenting it as an alternative to the ETH. It’s no more an alternative explanation to the ETH than the field of psychology, or biology.
It’s certainly an interesting direction of study and research, but I don’t see why it’s any more relevant to the area of ufo sightings than, for example, the areas of human romance or international politics or the study of the human recollection of car crashes.
Briefly put, that leaves us with the ETH, or no explanation at all. We might still consider other ideas like “the interdimensional hypothesis,” but until somebody can explain how that works in terms of actual credible physics, then I think that idea is still too vague and ill-defined to rise to the level of a hypothesis. One needs to have an explanation of
how something can be physically viable, before it can reach the level of stature of a valid and rational scientific hypothesis.
In fact I don’t really see how the co-creation hypothesis really applies to the kind of sighting that I’ve had, and which is the focus of my interest. I saw a pair of bright and/or reflective objects zig-zagging across the daytime sky in perfect formation, at high speed, standing with four of the other kids in my neighborhood. And we all offered our ideas of what we might be seeing out loud; “Helicopter?” “No, that’s not a helicopter, they can't move that fast.” “Plane?” “No, planes can’t zig-zag like that.” We ran out of ideas pretty fast. And I still have no idea what we saw that day – could’ve been some super-advanced human technology, or some wildly improbable natural phenomenon, but frankly the best working hypothesis that I can see is the ETH. So I favor that explanation, in lieu of new information that may come to light someday.
Similarly, in this talk Greg described his sighting of some bizarre shiny black object hanging in the air at an airport, with four pointy pencil-like shapes. That’s what he saw – he doesn’t question that, and neither do I. But he doesn’t know what it was, and neither do I. But based on everything that I know about human technology, and everything that we now know about the likelihood of intelligent life in this galaxy and universe at large, I tend to favor an ETH explanation.
And the co-creation hypothesis only deals with the fidelity of perception and memory, so it doesn’t offer an alternative explanation. But it might raise questions about things like the size and distance of the object, and our limited perceptions of light frequencies, or the sequence and timing of the sighting event.
That brings us to the issue of probability. Our culture seems to be lagging behind the scientific data, when it comes to the subject of warm and potentially living Earth-like worlds in the universe - apparently culture has some kind of cognitive inertia. Because the idea of extraterrestrial life, or even intelligent extraterrestrial life with interstellar spaceflight capability,
used to seem improbable before we had the results of the Kepler Mission, and before we knew about the ubiquity of water and amino acids throughout the universe, and before we understood the dynamical evolution of planetary systems and planetary composition. Now all of that has changed. Today, we know that there are over 40 billion warm Earth-like worlds in our galaxy alone, and over 40 billion trillion warm Earth-like worlds in the observable universe alone (which is in turn only a speck of the entire universe), moving through stellar systems chock full of water and the building blocks of life (and we now know that life appeared on the Earth pretty much as soon as the Earth cooled down enough to support carbon-based life). So now the odds are extremely favorable to a model of the universe that's teeming with life, and we have no reason left to presume that it's at all rare. The only remaining question is the prevalence of intelligent life, and even on that question we have no logical reason to presume that the evolution of intelligent life is extremely rare. Seventy years ago it wasn't totally unreasonable to wonder if there were any other intelligent civilizations out there in the universe. But today, the most reasonable scenario appears to describe our galaxy as a system lushly populated with organic life, and probably thousands or more planets inhabited by technological civilizations, most of which are probably many millions or even billions of years ahead of us, because most of the star systems in our galaxy are older than ours:
"We found that most potentially habitable star systems are much older than the Sun and located farther from the galactic centre. By comparing the ages of these systems we estimated that ~77% of potentially habitable star systems are on average ~3.13 billion years older than the Sun. This suggests that any intelligent life in the Galaxy is likely to be incredibly more advanced than we are assuming that they have evolved under similar timescales than we have."
"The Age Distribution of Potential Intelligent Life in the Milky Way," Daniel Legassick, 2015
In light of these newly discovered facts, it would be a far greater mystery if our planet
weren't being visited by alien civilizations from time to time. Fermi was perfectly correct to ask the question "Where is everybody?" He should've looked up, because the answer appears to be: "all around us."
Two final points of interest – it’s true that most people seem to forget strange experiences. I’ve run across this twice in my life, and it’s both frustrating and fascinating. I would love to know why I remember strange events in life, and why others forget them. Perhaps it’s because I think of life’s most mysterious and anomalous experiences as among the most precious treasures in life, because they represent an opportunity to learn something new, and potentially very exciting, whereas others may see them as impractical distractions from the daily work of surviving and navigating the routines of life.
And lastly, awhile back I suggested on the forums that ghost hunters should wear portable biosensing apparatuses so they become the detection instrument at haunted locations. Apparently I wasn’t the first person to think of that, which is disappointing. But I’m surprised and bewildered that somebody like Paul Kimball hasn’t done this (as far as I know, anyway). Because the one thing we can sure about with ghost experiences, is that human beings experience them. And I recall Dr. Barry Taff saying that things like cold spots don’t show up on temperature gauges. But we feel them. So we should use our technology to monitor our bodies (and even our brains, if possible) as we have these kinds of experiences, so we can measure these experiences
indirectly via the human sensing instrument, which we know is sensitive to all the known haunting sensations and perceptions. Perhaps we'll discover that some noncorporeal form of life (if that's even possible) or some kind of unidentified physical field, is directly interacting with our limbic system.